Empires of Knowledge
Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World, edited by Paula Findlen
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21749451 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Fabien Simon (0009-0000-4338-0080, Université Paris Cité, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Pages | 1-7 |
| Publication date | 2023-07-13 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | East Asian Science Technology and Medicine (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1562-918X • E-ISSN: 2666-9323 |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1163/26669323-20230007 |
| OpenAlex | W4384341279 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 1 |
How could a hundreds of years old Chinese stele transform into a French Tarot game for Antoine Court de Gébelin in 1779?How could a Massachusetts engraved stone, voyaging through the pages of the Philosophical Transactions in 1714, be considered written with Oriental characters?It is to such intriguing questions that this volume, edited by Paula Findlen, offers some very interesting answers.More precisely, the volume focuses on how the process of circulation affects the interpretation of knowledge, and how artefacts were construed from totally different angles when they were integrated into different contexts.The book thus "seeks to answer questions about what role these networks played in the making of knowledge, how information traveled, how it was transformed by travel, and who the brokers of this world were" (back cover presentation).The book contains four parts, "Brokers of knowledge", "Configuring scientific networks", "How knowledge travels" and "The local and the global", plus three "epilogues" on "Scientific networks reconsidered" by Carla Nappi, Rachel Midura and Harold J. Cook.In total, it includes papers by no less than sixteen authors.It is to be noted that the themes of the different parts of the book often overlap, so that the allocation of the papers to the sections is not really strict: the Italian naturalist Antonio Vallisneri and the Secretary of the Royal Society Henry Oldenburg, for instance, are treated in Part ii on "Scientific networks", although they obviously also acted as "brokers" through their extensive networks like the famous polymath Samuel Hartlib, who is included in Part I (Carol Pal, chapter 4 "The early information factory ..."); and the movements of knowledge between France and China during the Enlightenment, studied by Alexander Statman in Part iii, are comparable with those in the Atlantic world
Art history · Epistemology · Naturalism · Polymath · Sociology · Sociology of scientific knowledge · Classics · History · History of Science and Medicine · Medicine · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |